Archives: American Extremism

Something weird happened in the 90’s. The demographic shifts
predicted years before seemed to accelerate. Collectively “non-whites” were
becoming a majority and the social construct known as “whiteness” was
threatened.

Only American whiteness could go through this crisis in the
way it is, the complete lack of self-consciousness and self-awareness inherent
in the institution of American whiteness would cause anyone thinking critically
about the concept a massive aneurism. Whiteness started out as an undercover
expression of Americanness as a matter of fact the two were equally
exchangeable. As class divisions broadened and slavery was introduced as an
institution the modern idea of “whiteness” was born. Poor whites might have
been poor but at least they were white.

Whiteness in its selective inclusiveness decided that Italians, Irish, and Spaniards could join their ranks fully enough to bolster their numbers and reinforce the idea that European culture (whatever the hell that actually is) was permanently tied to the American idea of whiteness. There were no more exclusive divisions between them as there were for the first half of the existence of America and about a few thousand years before. Side note: this is why no one should be surprised that the Alt-right has more than a few members who are Latinx. Inclusion of borderline minorities into the pantheon of whiteness isn’t new. Hell, they’ve even added a few Candice Owens and Jessie Lee Petersons as tangential allies.

So how does all of this amount to a death cult?

White Supremacy has always been about white dominance. It has always to some extent been about fear of white extinction, especially in America. Now that white birthrates have continued to decline, and white suicide rates continue to skyrocket, that narrative is given a whole lot of support for the notion of the destruction of the white race.

Never mind that its damn difficult to get a good
comprehensive definition of what that actually means especially given the
inclusion over time of previously “non-white” Europeans, whiteness is losing
its footing. There is no part of American whiteness that hasn’t been touched,
created, shaped or assisted by non-whites. There is still that hammer fisted
need to coopt the culture as a whole through proclamation, but as anyone who
has taken a DNA test for any reason knows, things aren’t nearly that cut and dry.
The DNA of America is decidedly mixed, its culture is hybrid and its
institutions although still bastions of White Supremacy, are folding. What
modern White Supremacy attempts to do is to culturally and physically separate or
eliminate non-white influence.

Doing that is like pulling the mitochondria form our cells, it’s
like removing a strand of DNA it will distort and then kill the person or
culture. At this point all the military worship, Sparta felation and Trump
supporting only pushes that vague concept of whiteness further into the trash.
The symbols of war, the glorification of death and the fear of losing the glory
of the past has pushed many a nation into divisions of convenience. The White
Supremacist death cult will likely do the same to the form of whiteness its adherents
wish to preserve.

The fear and panic of the elites who are more interested in family power than racial purity display some of these traits as well. With the shrinking of the availability of mates at their class level, wealthy whites are more likely to intermarry with South Asians, Chinese and Japanese, as those with better education are more likely to intermarry and wealthy whites are by far better educated than their poorer counterparts. The elites are still less inclined to marry into races that have typically been deemed inferior, so middle and lower class whites seem more likely to see their White Supremacy as threatening these groups. Oddly though the groups the intermarry with have in their own histories inherent class divisions, biases, and exclusions based on culture and or ethnicity. In many ways, this mirrors working-classing class whitness that has slowly become more ethnically inclusive in its ranks.

I often think about what a white homeland, as proposed by separatists would look like and how it would be structured. How would the government work, what system of government would it be how would rights be determined. Every utopian experiment tried so far that attempted some sort of purity test for entry has failed miserably. Not to mention that there hasn’t been a successful experiment on such a scale…. ever.

You can site Israel but I don’t think that applies and the nation got plenty of assistance from the US and others in its establishing years. I can’t imagine that a white homeland would get much governmental support aside from the land annexed. Though I can imagine them receiving help from sympathetic Europeans, that is a far cry from the institutional knowledge and infrastructural experience of a large established country.

I see that experiment descending into internal strife where all the uneducated angry whites who think it’s a good policy to move in with their better-educated cousins because uncle and auntie will provide them with jobs and a sense of purpose. I see cultural and personal differences of opinions turning into violence and chaos. I see a dictatorial society with no one left to target as the other turning in on itself and devouring its own untread upon tail. I see once the race war is won a class war brewing beneath. I see a death cult that will do nothing more than bring about the very destruction they seek to avoid.

The signs are legion. They come in many shades from skulls and
flags to polos and BMWs. Whiteness is resurgent.

There are many flavors, all in some way aligned or at least signatories
to a non-aggression compact.

I spent some time in Rhode Island this past week in a
wealthy part of the state that abutted a rural one. The northeast has many of
these and I recognized denizens of both, peacefully coexisting or at the very
least ignoring each other. The wealthy, especially the young ones, are very
recognizable. I’ve spent some years around people like them and I knew the
look. The way they carry themselves is distinctive, the boat shoes and the
button down or polo shirts and that air the soft spoken confident (daddy can
get me out of anything) usually either slight of build or slightly athletic,
their maleness comes in the form of their privilege. The awkwardness that
usually comes with their age isn’t apparent in them as they wait at service
counters behind Oakley’s or Wayfarers, generally holding their head back just
enough to signal that the air in the room is theirs and they alone are allowing
you to share it.

The others, are working class to just barely upper middle class. Bedecked in grunt style and copious facial hair many of them resemble the late sniper Chris Kyle. Statistically its impossible for all of them to have served in the military although you wouldn’t know it without knowing them. Their Pickups are decked out in Realtree, spartan. NRA and/or skull stickers and judging by this I assume their politics generally range from apolitical to alt-right.

The second group I’m more familiar with, they populate the town
where I now live and hold court in the tows surrounding, some drive loud, large
and intimidating trucks and hold a deeper, more menacingly straight-backed confidence
that sometimes borders on threatening. They are the white rural analogue to the
wannabee gangsters that sped through the streets of the towns and cities in
which I spent much of my life. If I had a purse to clutch, I’d be doing so as
they came down the sidewalk, crossing the street as I did.

They both explicitly benefit from their whiteness. One
through inherited wealth, the other through inherited privilege. Neither will
generally openly admit it but both groups, regardless of who they vote for,
participate actively in white supremacy and are terrified of their advantages
being tipped.

After Charlottesville it became apparent that there was a
large contingent of both who are terrified enough to associate themselves with
a movement that will use violent intimidation as a fear response against losing
their hegemony. Fear makes strange
bedfellows, I remember the tensions growing up between the white working-class
kids surrounding my lower-class neighborhood and the wealthier people on the east
shore. Entertainment was rife with examples of class struggles among the still
majority whites. No one embodied that struggle between the partition and
working classes like John Hughes. The Breakfast Club, Some Kind of Wonderful, and
to a lesser extent Sixteen Candles all to one degree or another examined the
rift at the top.

Those depictions fizzled out as the 80’s ended, and Nerds became the new minority subset in white America. There was the occasional colored person (before we became people OF color) almost always their race was played for sympathy or laughs (the flamboyant gay black nerd, the awkward Asian dude who although he was clearly the smartest guy in the room never had the white gravitas to be anything but a running slant eyed joke all courtesy of Revenge of the Nerds) had all but otherwise disappeared.

Now as Whiteness as a concept is in both jeopardy and ascendance,
jeopardy because of dwindling birthrates and immigration and ascendance because
of pushback against those forces. White people are doubling down in larger
numbers on being white.

I’ve said this a few times, in some ways humankind in general and white men, in particular, are gearing up for some kind of war. We are animalizing in ways that are physically and socially apparent. The elevation of military service or the appearance of it in rural communities (who do commit more men and women per capita than any other) and that “look” moving into suburban communities as well, the reversion to a battle-ready body type bearded, mirror shades, indistinguishable from your typical Seal. The explosive growth over the last 10 years of everything “tactical” (most of it made in China, by the way), the reinforcement of the type of throwback maleness that toxifies the culture, the obsession with Spartan culture (or at least the non-gay parts) have signaled to me this coming culture change.

All of it, on purpose or by mistake, is a product of, is buttressed by and is a direct decedent of White Supremacy. Our nation was founded on it, racial delineation in this country took precedence over class divisions because of purposeful use of the idea that “whiteness” even at its most abject, was above everything else. After the Civil War, it worked well in terms of keeping the masses at bay and keeping the newly freed enslaved still. Not by government mandate but by armed citizen militias and the cultural embedding of an idea of superiority.

The government was an active participant when it had to be. It encouraged racial division on the state level which was ignored at the federal level. GI’s coming back from both world wars were denied the benefits their white counterparts enjoyed, delaying or outright deraining participation in probably the most expansive inclusion of Americans in the financial system. If you were white and participated in the war economy, you benefitted. Post great depression (whose devastation on minorities still hasn’t been fully researched and exposed) economic expansion during the war years barely touched minority communities, and government wasn’t very helpful in encouraging that recovery. Another round of White Supremacy was born, the Klan was revitalized and began another terroristic war on minorities.

There is a lot to unpack here and this is just one woman’s experience but I thought it was interesting. The part about crime struck me as well as the strangeness of returning to America. I wish I’d been able to travel abroad when I was younger but at least I can explore other’s perspectives of living outside the US.

“Based on recent behavior and previous statements, the North Carolina Republican Party is unable and unwilling to support the Republican nominated candidate for North Carolina House District 48″ – GOP chairman Robin Hayes .

The Republican party has been putting up with the precursor to this for YEARS therefore encouraging and supporting it. Chickens….meet roost.

We don’t give a fuck that we are demonizing kids, both our own and those just yearning to breathe free. We’ve created a MS13 factory by separating kids from parents in the vain effort to use them as playing cards in our xenophobic deck.
We’ve hardened our hearts to each other in our webspheres and countless subreddits.
We’ve said the we want to protect life, but only if its politically expedient.
We turn our backs on each other because of our races, languages and the places we live. If we knew, truly, where we’ve been, the politicized history of denial of entry to those we feel are degenerate or lesser. From the Irish, to the Jew, to the Arab and the Mexican, someone always has to be less than us. And don’t even start me on “forced immigration.”
If there really is intelligent life out there and somehow they have condescended to look at us as microbes in a petri dish, they are surely appalled at our lack of care for each other and the big brownish ball we live on. We’d better be happy they can’t see us or haven’t yet found us or we’d surely be wiped off the face of the universe with extraterrestrial Lysol. Good news is that we probably won’t feel a thing.

We’ve become the absolute worst measure of humanity, our better angels have been slain by the devils we’ve nurtured through ignorance and greed.

On this 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King I’d like to say a few things.

We are, despite our division, in a much better place then we were in 1968.

Despite that we still have a long way to go.

For anyone who wonders if the words and actions of the civil rights movement still have relevance, remember that within most living people’s lifetime there were laws that restricted citizen’s rights to marry, travel and raise children.

That… economic strength, passed on through the generations, was not as strong for women and communities of color, if you were a woman of color things were at least twice as hard.

That… the modern middle class was built on the strength of a massive war effort and the financial benefits that came with it, and that African-Americans were largely exempted from those benefits. These foundations were even further distant when considering that discriminatory hiring, firing and salaries were common and when African-Americans tried to band together to demand better conditions violence always ensued.

The current conditions, economic disparities supported by racist assumptions that are now being used to prove those very assumptions, have been with us a very long time. If the country is over 200 years old and Civil Rights have been in place by law for 50 of those years, even assuming everyone instantly got the rights they deserved, which they didn’t, we have been a bigoted country supported by racist institutions for 3/4 of our existence.

Making it personal, If you have made any “mistakes” in your 20’s are 50 and are still paying for them you are, those mistakes put you about where we are as a country now, older and not really all that much wiser.

Post-racialism is a myth concocted by people who hope we get too lazy to do the math or too distracted to not look at the calendar. If we do nothing else lets not forget that we are only a short few steps into this new paradigm and it isn’t too early to lose it all.

Sometimes its hard to tell what our president is thinking. Sometimes I think he’s not thinking at all but reacting.

Yeah, I know, its been said before.

That’s why I haven’t been commenting much on Trump lately. There are far more people (both more qualified and less than I) making statements about and trying to guess what the president is thinking, probably more than at any other time since he’s been a public figure.

Just since November of 2016, the conversation has shifted from trying to do the math as to how he won in the first place to what he’ll do to where he was coming from to is he mentally fit to hold office. So many of these questions have obvious answers. He won by appealing to the baser instincts of a group of Americans who not only feel left behind but even if they voted for him, as many did, were swayed by the constant barrage of dog whistle idiocy that was the media during the Obama administration. They feel left behind by a country that always told them they were golden, chosen people, so when that promise was uncovered as a lie they rebelled. As with most popular rebellions, the scapegoat firewall lay between them and the people who truly fucked them over.

Never before in my lifetime have I seen the Country in such a state of reactionary fervor. If I’ve learned anything it is that you should never think things can’t get any worse, or any weirder. Sometimes being prepared for the worst is the best you can hope for. Not that you should abandon all hope or lose all sense of optimism, but keeping those things in the vacuum of the naive belief that “people are generally good” is downright suicidal.

I often try to look at recent history and try to draw a flowchart in my head to link all the things I’ve seen since the end of the Vietnam era ( I was born the year the conflict reached its Apex of 500,000 US troops) and remember middle-class. I mostly remember the palpable sense of dread that came with slowly admitting defeat in an unwinnable battle. I was born the year of nationwide unrest over the treatment of African-Americans (we were called negro, Colored or just Nigger at the time, in equal measure) and the year before the death of Martin Luther King.

I remember watching as the post-civil rights era played out, how legal segregation turned into redlining and blockbusting and I remember how the wash of irony felt as I sat in a real estate class 40 years later and heard my teacher discuss the practices as if they were ancient history (they weren’t, and aren’t). A few years before that I watched my Mom “steered” into a property in a mostly black part of town and in a double whammy also watched her sold a subprime mortgage with a huge balloon payment that would have kept her in permanent share-cropper status for the rest of her life. I watched as friends who had genius level IQ’s , but had little or no support at home, were shuffled into “alternative education” and taken out of the system of merit they would have all but taken over.

I watched the systematic dismantling of families, the ignorance of the problems faced by people who were just out of reach of the middle-class dream, not quite poverty-stricken, but barely able to make the rent, the car payment, and the heat, and often one or more of the above would suffer. (oh and food, let us not forget food)

I also remember being terror-stricken by television, the resurgence and resurgence, and further resurgences of “hate groups,” militias and various other largely white organizations whose members instinctively knew that their days as the majority were numbered. Who ignored the unequal application of benefits to them and cherry-picked statistics to bolster their own “superiority” (there is nothing funnier and scarier than listening to someone uneducated and unwilling to be, call me a monkey) even when they had an 8th-grade education and hardly a tooth to speak of.

I saw the 50-year slide into identity politics. WHITE identity politics. And now I shake my head when I hear someone like Richard Spenser, Alex Jones or any of their loosely affiliated internet sleeper cell operatives promote the narrative that Blacks, “the Left” and the “the gays” are the ones who started this whore identity politics shit. As a writer, I look out into the world, and it makes no narrative sense, as a truth-teller the story is flawed in a way that disqualifies it even as magical realism. There is nothing real about it.

As I look over all the historical links in my lifetime, I see definite patterns. Some overlap and others diverge, but a few, though taking up different sections of the page, clearly resemble each other.

Taking the experiences of poor White Americans and Poor Black Americans in snapshots of events, drug addiction, poverty, enslavement (Blacks by government mandate through slavery and its aftermath and whites by government mandate through union busting and land grants to wealthy corporations) they trace similar paths. The positive elements also converge, reverence for the elderly, a sense of community, developments in art and culture, resistance to undue authority…

But somehow, some way, the two rarely meet.

They don’t meet because one group, although downtrodden, believed that they were better by virtue of “whiteness”. That belief carried down through the years and was the current on the river to Trumpville.

This is not fake news.

Thinking for a second about some of the self-described leaders of these folks and their motivations there has to be something other than the endgame that gets them off. Even if they could eliminate or disassociate themselves from the rest of us there are still going to be sociopathic tendencies, violent individuals, and disagreements within their midsts.

I often wonder how an ethnostate of any sort would look. Having no skin in the game and no need to wish for such a thing I think I’m a bit freer than most to imagine a more realistic version of this utopia.

It would be like any other society, divided along some imaginary, or real but either way subtly enforced means, messy and stratified and pretty much just as fucked up as the one we have now. Either it would have classlessness imposed by a tyrant, or be capitalistic and leave some people behind. Either way, there is no escape from the same bullshit we face daily, it would just be whiter, or blacker. There is no way, through merely segregating “Europeans” or “Africans” to magically make everything better. The same power struggles, the same marital disagreements, the same arguments about government and what it should and can do will still exist.

Just because y’all look the same, does not make you the same.

Have you ever seen people who agree, are of the same background or the same political beliefs all in the same room together and NOT arguing? In most cases, intra-group disagreements are more violent than those between groups. Without the political or racial “other” to swerve the distraction bus towards, those conflicts would explode.